Opinion | The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Endorsement Calls Are Self-Sabotage

I can think of some compelling reasons that leading independent newspapers should not be in the business of endorsing candidates for president.

Unfortunately, the acts of self-sabotage by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times do not reflect any of them. And so one more bulwark against autocracy erodes.

The owners of both papers took as long as possible to reveal what they had already concluded: For the first time in years — since 2004 for The Los Angeles Times and 1988 for The Post — each would refrain from endorsing a presidential candidate. This inspired Donald Trump’s campaign to whoop that even Vice President Kamala Harris’s “fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job.” The Times’s editorial editor, Mariel Garza, resigned and said the decision made the organization look “craven and hypocritical.” Others followed.

The Post’s endorsement of Ms. Harris had reportedly already been drafted, only to be shelved on the orders of its owner, Amazon’s founder, Mr. Bezos. But it fell to the paper’s publisher, William Lewis, to announce the decision, saying, “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” Its editorial editor, David Shipley, in the face of his mutinous editorial board, said he owned the outcome, which he called a way of creating “independent space” for voters to make up their own minds.

I’m not worried that Post and Los Angeles Times readers will have trouble deciding how to vote. I’m worried they’ll have trouble deciding whom to trust.

Both papers are owned by billionaires — Patrick Soon-Shiong at The Times and Mr. Bezos at The Post — and it is this grim similarity that raises alarms, especially in the case of The Post, whose “Democracy dies in darkness” motto now moans like an epitaph. Rightly or wrongly, readers will reasonably conclude The Post backed off an endorsement of Ms. Harris to protect the owner’s business interests. Those interests are vast, spread across commerce, the military and, increasingly, the frothing frontiers of artificial intelligence. How now can readers trust The Post’s often excellent news coverage of those topics, which are core to its mission? It did not help the paper’s credibility when, on the day the nonendorsement was announced, Mr. Trump was spotted greeting executives of Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin space company in Austin, Texas.

The Post’s gutsy former editor Marty Baron was unsparing: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” he posted on X. “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Forswearing the ritual of presidential endorsements might be defensible, even admirable, if the decision had unfolded differently and about three years earlier. Newspaper endorsements are seldom influential and are frequently confusing. They are traditionally the prerogative of the publisher or owner and are concocted by an editorial board that typically exists in an independent, parallel universe from the newsroom. Few outside the industry know this, and most readers naturally take endorsements as an expression of partisan support from the whole institution, not merely an antiseptically isolated outpost. (The New York Times stopped making endorsements in local races but continues to do so for the presidential contest.)

Democracies need citizens to trust in their institutions, the press chief among them. When you ask people why they have been losing trust in the media, they frequently refer to the bias and agendas they see in the coverage, and it’s easy to see how endorsements make this problem worse. In our age of media saturation, there is no shortage of commentary about candidates — adversarial, analytical, scholarly and scrappy, including from the varsity columnists at these news outlets — so voters will hardly be marooned if faceless editorial boards don’t also weigh in. When I was the editor at Time magazine, we did not have an independent editorial board; our readers got enough peppery punditry from our opinion writers. It’s possible that fewer institutional endorsements would be a valuable step toward restoring trust in the fairness and public purpose of our leading news organizations.

That’s not what we are watching here. Neither paper has developed a sudden allergy to endorsements; The Post backed the Maryland Democratic Senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks weeks ago, as The Los Angeles Times did for the California Democrat Adam Schiff. And the arguments against endorsing have been circulating for years. Announcing a sudden change in policy so close to the election suggests cowardice more than conviction, however much airbrushing the apologists do.

I have immense respect and sympathy for journalists at news organizations, which are increasingly embattled just when we need them most. The business model is dissolving, social media platforms are piranhas, the competition for attention is relentless, and the stakes could not be higher. Billionaires like Mr. Bezos have pumped millions of dollars into newsrooms so that reporters can do the essential work of telling us what’s happening. This is no time to abandon them. They deserve better than this, and so do the rest of us.

Nancy Gibbs is the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School and a former editor in chief of Time magazine.

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